The NEC EA261WM provides an ultrawide viewing area, some nice ergonomic and power-saving features, and great small-text reproduction, but it comes up short in terms of grayscale and viewing-angle performance, and doesn't come cheap.

The largest of NEC's EA series of enterprise-class displays, the EA261WM ($599 direct), targets business users who require the screen real estate needed to view side-by-side documents and multiple application windows without having to run a multi-monitor setup. This pricey, 26-inch wide-color-gamut panel delivers rich colors and stellar text reproduction and offers a handful of business-friendly features, but it struggles with grayscale and viewing-angle performance.

A very thin (0.6-inch) matte black bezel surrounds the screen, which has a resolution of 1,920 by 1,200 pixels and uses wide-gamut technology to display up to 92 percent of the NTSC color spectrum. A large, round base and telescoping arm provide plenty of support for the big panel and allow a wide range of ergonomic adjustments, including height, tilt, swivel, and pivot. A set of hooks on the mounting arm keeps all cabling organized and tucked away behind a removable cover. Despite the panel's size and weight, the stand can be easily adjusted using one hand, and the wide base prevents it from wobbling or tipping while pivoting the screen. I/O ports include DVI and VGA inputs, one upstream USB port, four downstream USB ports (two of which are conveniently positioned on the left side of the cabinet), and an audio input. The down-firing 1-watt speakers are adequate for low-volume use but are no substitute for a pair of desktop speakers. Given the panel's ability to display high-definition content, the lack of an HDMI port is a glaring omission.

Mounted on the lower right-hand bezel are four well-marked function buttons and a power switch that glows blue when the monitor is in normal operating mode and turns amber when it's in standby mode. The Menu button launches and closes the on-screen display (OSD) program, while the Select button activates the highlighted selection and acts as a hot key for selecting an input source. The Reset/DV Mode button restores the highlighted selection back to its factory default setting and lets you choose one of the five preset luminance modes (Standard, Text, Movie, Gaming, and Photo). There's also a handy four-way toggle switch, which makes it easy to navigate the OSD by allowing you to move up, down, left, and right within the menus as if you were using a joystick. Once inside the OSD, you can tweak a variety of settings, including color temperature, brightness and contrast, sharpness, and speaker volume. There's also an Off Timer option that will power down the monitor after a predetermined period of inactivity. If you prefer to change these settings using a keyboard and mouse, you can do so using NEC's NaViSet utility, but it is not included in the box. Instead, you'll have to go to NEC's Web site and fill out an electronic form before you can download it.

The EA261WM features an ECO mode setting that, when activated, reduces the panel's brightness to 50 percent from the factory default of 100 percent; this in turn reduces power consumption from 85W to 48W, as measured using a P3 International Kill A Watt meter. When ECO mode is enabled, a "carbon footprint meter," which indicates the reduction in carbon emissions while operating in ECO mode, appears in the brightness adjustment screen. For example, according to the meter, switching to ECO mode results in a 15 percent carbon footprint reduction. The meter begins tracking total carbon savings (in kilograms) from the moment the monitor is powered up. NEC offers a Total Trade recycling service that provides credit toward new NEC products when you trade in your old equipment. Additionally, the EA261WM is EPEAT Gold, Energy Star, and RoHS qualified. All of this earns it our GreenTech Approved seal.

If you work with multipage documents or desktop publishing apps, you'll appreciate this monitor's ability to reproduce the smallest fonts. Using images from the DisplayMate testing suite (www.displaymate.com), the EA261WM did an excellent job of displaying fonts set to 5.3 points (the smallest setting on the Scaled Fonts test). Text quality was crystal clear, and every character was well defined and perfectly legible.

Color quality was also very good; the wide-gamut panel produced rich colors without any trace of tinting or oversaturation. The panel's 5-millisecond (black-to-white) pixel response rate offered good motion-handling performance as well. I played a round of Far Cry 2 without experiencing any artifacts or ghosting, and Pixar's Madagascar 2 on DVD played smoothly and looked spectacular on the big screen. However, the monitor did not fare so well when it came to rendering grayscale swatches. It was unable to display the lightest and darkest shades of gray on the DisplayMate 64-Step Grayscale Test, showing them as pure white or black instead.

The panel's horizontal viewing-angle performance pretty much bore out NEC's claim of 170 degrees, but the vertical angle was much narrower, especially from the bottom, where colors began shifting at around 150 degrees. The flaw may not be an issue when you are operating the display in landscape mode, but when you rotate the panel to view it in portrait mode the weak viewing angles offer a faded, subpar picture from either side.

The EA261WM comes with a three-year warranty covering parts, labor, and backlighting. DVI and VGA cables are included in the box, along with an audio cable, an upstream USB cable, and a setup guide.

The NEC EA261WM will appeal to business users who require the extended viewing area provided by a 26-inch display and don't mind paying a premium for niceties such as a USB hub and a sturdy, fully adjustable stand. If you don't have $600 to spend on a big-screen monitor, there are cheaper alternatives, such as Acer's B273HU (check back soon for my review), which offers a 27-inch screen with a higher resolution, for around $200 less.

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As a Contributing Editor for PC Magazine, John Delaney has been testing and reviewing monitors, HDTVs, PCs, servers, and other assorted hardware and peripherals for more than 14 years. A 13-year veteran of PC Magazine's Labs (most recently as Director of Operations), John was responsible for the recruitment, training and management of the Labs technical staff, as well as evaluating and maintaining the integrity of the Labs testing machines and procedures.
Prior to joining Ziff Davis Publishing, John spent six years in retail operations for Federated...
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